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Juza

Why don't people just use UDMF format?

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43 minutes ago, Zanieon said:

when you reach that complexity with voodoo dolls it is time to move to a format which support ACS so you can get rid of such hackery.

eh I dunno, it'd be a hell of a lot easier to make for sure but it's interesting to push boundaries like this. For the player that knows their map formats it's more impressive if something technically elaborate is pulled off as there's a sharp contrast to the simpler voodoo doll setups that you mention. It takes more to really impress in ZDoom maps because in the well-made ones, there's cool shit all over the place already.

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That's kind of unfair. Why are UMDF maps magically held to a higher standard where they must use too many features and then get lumped with the bad ones that do that and nothing else.

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11 minutes ago, Eris Falling said:

eh I dunno, it'd be a hell of a lot easier to make for sure but it's interesting to push boundaries like this. For the player that knows their map formats it's more impressive if something technically elaborate is pulled off as there's a sharp contrast to the simpler voodoo doll setups that you mention. It takes more to really impress in ZDoom maps because in the well-made ones, there's cool shit all over the place already.

Well i can say the challenge in ZDoom is filter what you want with the "cool shit all over the place" it has, one does not simply use everything and expect it to be good, i tried that in the past and the only thing i could salvage from the fucking mess my first wad was were the maps and today i go with few rules in mind when modding/mapping, but yeah i agree that when doing brainstorming things like this is a nice achievement even though not being practical.

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28 minutes ago, Pegg said:

That's kind of unfair. Why are UMDF maps magically held to a higher standard where they must use too many features and then get lumped with the bad ones that do that and nothing else.

I had a sudden realized that a significant part of it might be because things like JoM and DUMP are very recent occurrences. Most of the maps people associate with feature-rich ports end up being huge undertakings like UT&T, Zen Dynamics, and ZPack, while more standard or conservative stuff just kinda ends up being ... irrelevant to most people.

 

Like, let's put this into context: the most well-known ZDoom map pack that's fairly basic and just goes at its own pace is likely Mock 2. If that doesn't tell you something, I don't know what will.

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45 minutes ago, Pegg said:

That's kind of unfair. Why are UMDF maps magically held to a higher standard where they must use too many features and then get lumped with the bad ones that do that and nothing else.

I would agree that maybe this way of thinking isn't particularly "fair". At the same time, if you use UDMF in ways as basic as they come (which seems to be a minority of use cases for releases that have some manner of "gravity" to them), you have excluded PrBoom+ for no actual reason other than maybe personal preference of format. It's at that point that I'd argue you might as well have used boom to reach a wider audience by virtue of including another popular port that your maps can be played with. This seems to be the reason why some people kind of expect ZDoom format maps to actually use some of their advanced features to "justify" the use case to begin with, because why exclude a source port when you don't really have to? Let's not pretend that people never went for UDMF just to use wall-textures as flats.

 

That said, the only reason for me to ever map in UDMF would be to do something that boom doesn't bring to the table, and the most noteworthy things are 3D floors and ACS. If I don't need any of those to A) get the intended gameplay in place, and B) create a decent environment for people to move around in, I, personally, have no reason to use UDMF at all. I suppose the same applies to several other people as well, because, like I said, if it were that easy to pinpoint how UDMF is so much better than boom in every single respect [easy to get into, intuitive to use, simplistic "building blocks" with oodles of ways to apply them (and that's where this debate kinda kicked off)], people wouldn't use boom anymore.

 

The fact that people still happily use boom in spite of all the "UDMF is objectively the best thing since sliced bread" talk speaks volumes, but some people are simply astonishingly good at covering their eyes and ears (or making up nonsensical arguments about square roots, or trying to sneak an argument of authority in through the back-door). That aside, there's still lots of people who want the nostalgic "vanilla" behaviour of things with all the pros and cons, which includes designing their maps with these things in mind (others don't, their choice). The moment I map in anything ZDoom-y, I can not design around vanilla thing behaviour anymore at all, because of how the targeted source port operates in several respects, same deal if the targeted port is GZDoom. So that's one major aspect aside of large scale slaughter that you can have in boom, but not in UDMF, because the format determines which ports can be used and ports simply behave differently to varying extent, let's at least be honest about that in spite of all the "format ideology" that is happening here.

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1 hour ago, Pegg said:

Why are UMDF maps magically held to a higher standard where they must use too many features and then get lumped with the bad ones that do that and nothing else.

Doing cool stuff doesn't mean it has to use too many features. All I'm saying is that if some cool elaborate mechanism is done in Boom format or sometimes even vanilla maps pull some insane stuff off, it's more impressive than when a ZDoom map uses some advanced features to do the same thing because it's simpler to implement in the latter.

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16 minutes ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

I would agree that maybe this way of thinking isn't particularly "fair". At the same time, if you use UDMF in ways as basic as they come (which seems to be a minority of use cases for releases that have some manner of "gravity" to them), you have excluded PrBoom+ for no actual reason other than maybe personal preference of format. It's at that point that I'd argue you might as well have used boom to reach a wider audience by virtue of including another popular port that your maps can be played with. This seems to be the reason why some people kind of expect ZDoom format maps to actually use some of their advanced features to "justify" the use case to begin with, because why exclude a source port when you don't really have to? Let's not pretend that people never went for UDMF just to use wall-textures as flats.

 

That said, the only reason for me to ever map in UDMF would be to do something that boom doesn't bring to the table, and the most noteworthy things are 3D floors and ACS. If I don't need any of those to A) get the intended gameplay in place, and B) create a decent environment for people to move around in, I, personally, have no reason to use UDMF at all. I suppose the same applies to several other people as well, because, like I said, if it were that easy to pinpoint how UDMF is so much better than boom in every single respect [easy to get into, intuitive to use, simplistic "building blocks" with oodles of ways to apply them (and that's where this debate kinda kicked off)], people wouldn't use boom anymore.

 

The fact that people still happily use boom in spite of all the "UDMF is objectively the best thing since sliced bread" talk speaks volumes, but some people are simply astonishingly good at covering their eyes and ears (or making up nonsensical arguments about square roots, or trying to sneak an argument of authority in through the back-door). That aside, there's still lots of people who want the nostalgic "vanilla" behaviour of things with all the pros and cons, which includes designing their maps with these things in mind (others don't, their choice). The moment I map in anything ZDoom-y, I can not design around vanilla thing behaviour anymore at all, because of how the targeted source port operates in several respects, same deal if the targeted port is GZDoom. So that's one major aspect aside of large scale slaughter that you can have in boom, but not in UDMF, because the format determines which ports can be used and ports simply behave differently to varying extent, let's at least be honest about that in spite of all the "format ideology" that is happening here.

Pretty much sums up my exact thoughts on the matter, I'd map with UDMF but I just can't practically imagine myself using it to make something I could have made already in Boom format. Yeah, I like maps like Thunderpeak and Putrefier. But there's an audience for gameplay-focused maps, and coincidentally most of that same group tends to focus in the demo-recording scene or would prefer to map in Boom. Winter's Fury in particular is a great blend of gameplay and Zdoom effects, as well as Simplicity (like others were saying, you can go light on the effects and still focus on gameplay) but at the end of the day, it's what YOU plan on making and the target audience YOU want to achieve that matters. I guess I've learned something from this thread!

 

Huh.

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26 minutes ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

(or making up nonsensical arguments about square roots,

oh so

 

26 minutes ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

some people are simply astonishingly good at covering their eyes and ears

is self-reflective, then?

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1 hour ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

That said, the only reason for me to ever map in UDMF would be to do something that boom doesn't bring to the table, and the most noteworthy things are 3D floors and ACS.

You're still getting feature set and format confused.

 

UDMF doesn't add any features.  UDMF doesn't change any game behavior.  UDMF isn't a feature set.  UDMF isn't a source port.  UDMF is a map format. 

 

"ZDoom in Doom format" is still in "Doom format", even though it adds new features.  The format isn't the feature set.

Edited by Cynical

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@NIH no offence, but do you get paid or something for keeping this thread running for so long?

 

I mean, you argue how Boom is closer to vanilla and therefore better (fair argument IMO), but you know what's eVeNcLoSeR to vanilla? Vanilla itself, yo! Please name one thing you can do in Boom, but not in vanilla.

Scroller floors for voodoo scripts? Oh come on, crushed barrels are so much manlier. They do the same thing.

Action 242? Pff. Iikka Keranen is laughing out loud right now.

Generalized linedefs? OK that's actually kinda cool, but tbh it's not really like a new "feature", more like an existing one repurposed or whatever.

Sky transfers? Those are not Boom so lalala argument invalid

Ummmmmm I'm struggling to think about anything else. Guess why? Because Boom sucks and should not be used, ever due to how horribly heretical it is.

 

What I'm trying to say is, preferring Boom for being "more faithful", but still using that heresy of a port and not the actual Standard (tm), the original 1993 vanilla game, is kinda hypocritical, isn't it? Also I'm not as good at writing lengthy-ass clever-ass paragraphs of the same point reworded several times, but I think I have a point as well, or not??? Argue me, senpai. *throws glove*

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 
 
 

 
 
 


I'm trolling if you couldn't tell already
 
 
 
 

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1 minute ago, bzzrak said:

 Please name one thing you can do in Boom, but not in vanilla.

Six keys ;-)

[/countertroll]

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Dude, on whose side are you ffs?

 

Well actually...



(You could kinda replicate this, I guess. You could make e.g. 6 walls behind each other, place 6 (cosmetic-only :] ) keys on platforms or whatever, and make walking on each of the platforms lower a wall. Just like as if you had 6 keys, you'll have to go to 6 places to unlock a part of the map.)

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1 minute ago, bzzrak said:

Scroller floors for voodoo scripts? Oh come on, crushed barrels are so much manlier. They do the same thing.

lol.  the first map i ever published here was a convoluted boom map, and I was just learning boom then.  It was a weird inconsistent buggy mix of some conveyorbelts, but some janky setups that should've just been done in conveyorbelts. 

 

There's a trap that teleports dozens of barrels into to the map, but instead of just moving the barrels into a teleporter by conveyorbelt, I crush a whole 'nother set of barrels to nudge the other barrels over a set of teleporter lines, which teleports each barrel into a unique spot in the map.

 

There's also like 14 shootable switches on the same map that each transform geometry of the map with multiple actions.  Instead of just using a conveyorbelt like a sane person, I stack like half-dozen shootable linedef actions on the same "switch" (so there's technically dozens of shootable linedefs on the same map that are compacted into singular switches).  The result is that there's like a 5% chance of a shootable line-def skip over one of the linedefs but not the others, which terribly breaks the map because it's supposed to be synchronized.  It's a puzzlemap none-the-less, so it's hard to tell if something is intentional, or just plain broken :D

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I've often thought the idea of a new path opening by the simple act of retrieving a key could be kinda cool but I'm not sure if I've ever seen it before. Makes more sense for skull keys rather than keycards, admittedly.

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8 minutes ago, bzzrak said:

Dude, on whose side are you ffs?

 

Well actually...

 

  Hide contents

 

 

 


(You could kinda replicate this, I guess. You could make e.g. 6 walls behind each other, place 6 (cosmetic-only :] ) keys on platforms or whatever, and make walking on each of the platforms lower a wall. Just like as if you had 6 keys, you'll have to go to 6 places to unlock a part of the map.)
 

 

 

I'm actually not certain whose side I'm on -- I map in Doom format, and target prboom-plus as my preferred source port, partially out of habit, partially because the -complevel flag makes getting things set up properly more convenient for how I launch Doom than ZDoom's menus do, and partially because I like watching demos.  Even if prboom-plus was to start supporting UDMF tomorrow, I'd still map in Doom format because I always test my maps in DOS Boom to make sure they work there -- a residual effect of being around here when /newstuff mostly consisted of "Map does not work in intended source port" -- and it would just feel too wrong for me to not support that.

 

At the same time, I realize that UDMF is the better format *shrug*

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15 minutes ago, bzzrak said:

I mean, you argue how Boom is closer to vanilla and therefore better (fair argument IMO), but you know what's eVeNcLoSeR to vanilla? Vanilla itself, yo!

Wanna play one of my vanilla™ slaughtermaps? ;-)

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9 minutes ago, Eris Falling said:

I've often thought the idea of a new path opening by the simple act of retrieving a key could be kinda cool but I'm not sure if I've ever seen it before. Makes more sense for skull keys rather than keycards, admittedly.

Technically my JoM4 map does this, although it's only one key and, uh, I don't think what happens is what you were thinking when you wrote this.

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1 hour ago, esselfortium said:

People should create using the tools they’re comfortable with. No one is obligated to make their maps run in Pr+ just like no one is obligated to use UDMF. Explore the options if you want and see what’s out there so you can make an informed decision, absolutely, but it’s hard for me to see wrong options here as long as your choice enables you to make what you want to make and enjoy doing so.

 

Expecting map authors to change their preferred tools so you don’t have to install another sourceport strikes me as selfish and entitled. You can always just not play their maps if it’s that much of a bother.

Damn right.

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@bzzrakDang, that's why I need to run your map seriously this time because I should do this before (which has totally no relationship with this or what so ever) ;P

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1 hour ago, Cynical said:

Six keys ;-)

[/countertroll]

 

58 minutes ago, bzzrak said:

Dude, on whose side are you ffs?

 

Well actually...

 

  Hide contents

 

 


(You could kinda replicate this, I guess. You could make e.g. 6 walls behind each other, place 6 (cosmetic-only :] ) keys on platforms or whatever, and make walking on each of the platforms lower a wall. Just like as if you had 6 keys, you'll have to go to 6 places to unlock a part of the map.)
 

 

 

I think it's more accurate to say skull key doors that only open with skull keys instead of keycards and vice versa. But hey, six keys is good enough shorthand.

 

I think one of the Freedoom levels had all 6 keys (there are probably others, too) and accomplished it, if I remember correctly, by having sectors that raised behind the skull doors only after you crossed a walkover line and got that respective skull key, so the doors would appear to only open with the appropriate skull key and not that color keycard.

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2 hours ago, Pegleg said:

 

I think it's more accurate to say skull key doors that only open with skull keys instead of keycards and vice versa. But hey, six keys is good enough shorthand.

 

I think one of the Freedoom levels had all 6 keys (there are probably others, too) and accomplished it, if I remember correctly, by having sectors that raised behind the skull doors only after you crossed a walkover line and got that respective skull key, so the doors would appear to only open with the appropriate skull key and not that color keycard.

That's a really good idea.

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7 hours ago, Cynical said:

You're still getting feature set and format confused.

There is a significant correlation. If we're talking in practical terms, is there a reason to use UDMF if you're gonna use it for vanilla features only? Especially considering that no simple engine allows UDMF as of this moment.

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13 hours ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

Other than that, there are things you can do in boom that don't work in other formats (regardless of how "advanced" they are) which just so happens to be the reason the format won't just die like you think it will.

Such as? I'm curious.

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I usually like to map almost vanilla style UDMF maps, just to make sure I can get the great game play I usually focus more on in primitive formats. I hate being Feature heavy unless its useful or for good reason.

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10 minutes ago, MTrop said:

As the resident old man who has mapped for every conceivable format that a map can be in from Doom's inception up until now, every last person who is still posting in this thread after Xaser's post on page one should be ashamed of themselves for the white noise that they have created (I honestly expected better of some of you).

 

The bickering from the rest of page one up to this post can be summarized as a bunch of novice mappers waving their physical and metaphorical dongs around about how their chosen preference is superior than the others or about how their chosen source port is superior than the others (which is NOT the topic of the thread, by the way). It is akin to children arguing over what video game console is better than the other, fueled only because their mothers had enough money to buy them just one company's console in the current generation. For those that can afford them all, this is an argument perpetuated by insecure dingbats grasping at straws in order to feel superior to somebody else.

 

I could offer more insight into this nonsense and risk getting pulled into this shit-show, but I'd rather just pinch off this nugget of truth into this toilet bowl of a thread: all of your maps are terrible, so I really don't understand what could possibly be gained by arguing on an internet forum and not working on your mapping skills, all the while wondering why your magnum opuses haven't finished themselves yet.

 

 

Git gud, scrubs. MTrop out.

Preach. I shoulda stopped posting days ago.

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I can't help but only imagine what would happen if my friend Beezo came here and proclaimed that the only proper way to play Doom is with Dos/Dosbox, and that you're not supposed to use a mouse, and that user created content that isn't published by id Software isn't authentic or worth playing. 

Edited by Ajora

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